Take the time to go through each of these pieces and you’ll be crafting truly useful, audience-centered content that delights your readers (and makes sales).

Why Unlock the Power of Personas

No matter how great your content is, Ardath reminded her audience that, “if you don’t build personas you may not be telling the story that anybody cares about.”

Our readership will always be made up of real people with real problems; personas help us understand those people more completely.

Need a few more enticements to undertake your persona research? Ardath has done countless explorations, and she argues that when done well, personas can:

Actively inform content strategy

Increase relevance by matching value to context

Make buyers the hero of the story

Help drive buyer outreach

Provide a relationship-building framework

Create alignment with sales teams

Commonalities Create Personas

Before we launch into each of the nine parts of successful personas, let’s make sure we’ve got our definitions straight.

Personas focus on the commonalities among segments of your audience. Whenever you’re trying to decide what to include in any of the nine components below, things that the members have in common always trump the unique attributes of a handful of segment members.

The reason that we go to all the trouble of doing persona research in the first place is to arrive at validated commonalities among our audience that can inform our content strategy and drive engagement.

Ultimately, all of this should lead to better content, more leads, and increased revenue.

Pieces of High Quality Personas

We’ve all seen generic personas that don’t go much beyond name, age, and job title, but the really useful ones are deeply detailed documents.

Ardath suggests a 9-part discovery process to really get to know the people who make up your personas:

A day in the life

Objectives

Problems

Orientation

Obstacles

Questions

Preferences

Keywords and phrases

Engagement scenarios

We’ll walk through Ardath’s recommendations for each of these one at a time, but overall you’re looking to create scenes that will let you speak to people about their real world problems.

Whether that conversation happens through a downloadable resource or on the phone with an account rep, when you have valuable personas you can communicate with your audience with confidence.

A Day in the Life

These are first person scenarios, not stories about the person.

Ardath’s example was as follows:

No: Diane is a hard worker who is determined to make product launches more efficientYes: I’m struggling to get products to market faster because our processes are too convoluted but my boss is worried that changing them will create more chaos.

(Note: all examples in these persona components are from Ardath Albee’s presentation at the Intelligent Content Conference 2016)

Although one of the most important pieces of an effective persona, this component is best developed after you have all the other information below. Ardath suggests keeping it to about 300 words and focusing first on all the other components outlined below.

Persona Objectives

We’re not talking about the objective to reduce costs or run a faster mile. This component is focused on the goals and responsibilities that drive your personas’ decisions or keep them up at night.

No: Grow RevenuesYes: Eliminate inefficiency to speed time to market

Problems of a Persona

Problems are essentially the flip side of objectives according to Ardath. They are whatever could happen at each stage that keeps your persona from moving forward.

It can be very tempting to frame these problems around what you know your software or service can do, but, like all persona creation, it needs to be rooted in your audience’s real lives.

Specificity is also crucial when it comes to selecting topics for content:

Orientation Not Demographics

There’s really no need to get hung up on the demographic details of your personas unless they have a direct impact on your relationship with them.

For example:

No: Married with 2 kids + dogYes: 20 year career; confident leader; mentors his team

By focusing on the persona’s professional standing, this sample B2B persona makes communicating with him around a software purchase much easier. After all, if he has a dog, how does that change what type of content he’d like to consume?

Obstacles of Persona

It’s much too easy to just go with “price” and move on from obstacles, but in many cases (particularly in a B2B context) cost is not a primary decision driver.

Instead, consider why a potential customer might hesitate before making a payment or picking up the phone.

No: PriceYes: What do I need to know to convince Tom? What if our people won’t adopt the new workflows?

Common Questions

Conversations with real customers or prospects are invaluable in fleshing out this component. The closer you can get to their actual phrasing, the better.

According to Ardath, the type of questions you should focus on are the ones they ask on their journey from the status quo to making a choice. That choice could be to make a purchase, to postpone, or to abort the buying process altogether.

You’ll want to insert yourself as the source of answers to as many of those questions as possible.

No: What features does your product have?Yes: Given my situation, why should I care? How do I eliminate x to achieve y? What can I do now that I couldn’t do before?

Discovering a Persona’s Preferences

Again, we’re not talking about whether this group prefers white wine or beer; our focus should be on how they like to consume content or engage with account managers.

Persona preferences center around:

Channels

Social Media

Content Types

Content Formats

Interactivity

Preferred Media

Identifying Keywords and Phrases

Once again, don’t fall into the temptation to structure this component of your personas around your product.

Andrea loves to dissect marketing buzzwords and fads looking for the pearls of wisdom at their cores. Her favorite topic is agile marketing, which she believes holds the key to a more fulfilling (and less stressful) marketing career for individuals and a more powerful marketing department for business.
When not scrutinizing the latest agile methodologies, Andrea can be found on the volleyball court, at the park with her two delightful kids, or baking “calorie-free” cookies.
Connect with her on Twitter @AndreaFryrear, or on LinkedIn.

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